THREE SINGLE-MINDED SPECIAL COUNSELS WHO HAVE TAKEN ON THE PRESIDENT

Leon Jaworski

Jaworski prosecuted Nazi war criminals in Germany, but it was his takedown of Richard Nixon that earned him global fame. He was appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal, after Nixon ordered his predecessor’s firing. Jaworski took the job on the condition that ‘every person criminally involved should be prosecuted’. His big break came when he convinced the Supreme Court to order the release of Nixon’s recordings of Oval Office conversations. The tapes implicated Nixon and his closest aides in the cover-up of a burglary at the Democratic Party’s offices in the Watergate complex, and ultimately forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Jaworski described being stricken by the discovery of Nixon’s central role, but despite his early vow, decided against bringing criminal charges, concluding Nixon could not get a fair trial.

Lawrence Walsh

As an independent counsel, Walsh unravelled the Iran-contra scandal – a complex web spanning Ronald Reagan’s White House, Tehran and Nicaragua. It involved US officials covertly facilitating arms sales to Iran, ostensibly to secure the release of hostages, and diverting profits to the Contras, rebels attempting to overthrow Nicaragua’s Marxist rulers.

It took Walsh more than six years, from 1986, and $37 million to untangle, and triggered a wider debate about the wisdom of having independent counsels. Walsh’s biggest detractors were fellow Republicans, furious that a lifelong Reagan supporter had come out of retirement to doggedly investigate the President’s administration. For admirers, he was a model public servant, vindicated by the six convictions he won.

Kenneth Starr

With the obvious exception of Bill Clinton, no man can take more credit for the Monica Lewinsky scandal. A prominent Republican lawyer, Starr began investigating Clinton in 1994 over Whitewater, an ill-fated property deal. The probe metastasised into a pursuit of the President which changed the course of US politics. It led to Clinton’s 1998 impeachment – the first of a president in 130 years – for lying under oath about his affair with Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern. The Starr Report, as his findings came to be known, made him a household name. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate, but it marked the start of a new, more vicious chapter in Washington’s partisan warfare. Incredibly, Starr later defended Trump in his own Senate trial, and bemoaned the fact that America was living in ‘the age of impeachment’.